Electricity supply and delivery costs continue to rise, especially in remote or congested areas. Moreover, load centers (e.g., population centers where electricity is consumed) increasingly demand more electricity. In the U.S. energy infrastructure is such that power is mostly produced by resources inland, and consumption of power is increasing at load centers along the coasts. Thus, transmission and distribution (T&D) systems are needed to move the power from where it's generated to where it's consumed at the load centers. As the load centers demand more electricity, additional T&D systems are needed, particularly to satisfy peak demand. However, a major reason construction of additional T&D systems is unwise and/or undesirable is because full utilization of this infrastructure is really only necessary during relatively few peak demand periods, and would otherwise be unutilized or underutilized. Justifying the significant costs of constructing additional T&D resources may make little sense when actual utilization may be relatively infrequent.
Distributed energy storage is increasingly seen as a viable means for minimizing rising costs by storing electricity at the load centers for use during the peak demand times. An energy storage system (ESS) can enable a consumer of energy to reduce or otherwise control a net consumption from an energy supplier. For example, if electricity supply and/or delivery costs are high at a particular time of day, an ESS, which may include one or more batteries or other storage devices, can generate/discharge electrical energy at that time when costs are high in order to reduce the net consumption from the supplier. Likewise, when electricity rates are low, the ESS may charge so as to have reserve energy to be utilized in a later scenario as above when supply and/or delivery costs are high.
Presently available automatic controllers of electrical systems utilize rule sets and iteration to find an operating command that in its simplest form can be a single scalar value that specifies the charge (or discharge) power setting of a battery. The main drawbacks of this existing approach are that it doesn't necessarily provide economically optimal control considering all costs and benefits, rule sets become complex quickly, even for just two value streams (which makes the algorithm difficult to build and maintain), and this approach is not easily scalable to new rate tariffs or other markets or value streams (rule sets must be rewritten).
An economically optimizing automatic controller may be beneficial and may be desirable to enable intelligent actions to be taken to more effectively utilize controllable components of an electrical system, and without the aforementioned drawbacks.